ld to poison. Courtenay's birth, and the
fortune which was so nearly thrust upon him, give
his fate a kind of interest, and an authentic
account of it may not be unwelcome.

On the 18th of September, Peter Vannes, the English
resident at Venice, wrote to the queen from
Padua:--

"It hath pleased Almighty God, as the Author of all
goodness, and as One that doth nothing in vain, to
call the Earl of Devonshire to his mercy, even
about the hour, or little more or less, that I am
writing of this present; and being very sorry to
trouble your Highness with this kind of news, yet
forasmuch as the providence of God must be
fulfilled in all things, I shall somewhat touch his
sickness till the hour of death. True it is that
he, as I have perceived, for the avoiding all
suspicion from himself, hath chosen a life more
solitary than needed, saving the company of certain
gentlemen, Venetians, among whom he was much made
of. It chanced him upon three weeks agone, for his
honest recreation, to go to a place called Lio, a
piece of an island five miles from Venice, for to
see his hawks fly upon a wasted ground, without any
houses; and there he was suddenly taken with a
great tempest of wind and rain, insomuch that his
boat, called [a] gondola, could not well return to
Venice: and he was fain, for his succour, to take a
certain searcher's boat that by chance there
arrived, and so to Venice he came, being body and
legs very thinly clothed, refusing to change them
with any warmer garment. And upon that time, or
within few days after, as he told me, had a fall
upon the stairs of his house, and after seeming to
himself to be well, and finding no pain, took his
journey hither unto Padua; and for the avoiding of
the weariness of the water, and the labouring of